To Lift or not to lift

At the High School where I help out, I get a lot of football players asking me how to get faster. There seem to be several schools of thought among the kids. There are those that are willing to work out with resistance training (weights), and there are those that are afraid that resistance training will make them too bulky and slow them down. The ‘non lifting’ camp also tends to believe that you are either born with speed or you’re not.

But mostly, they ask me the question hoping that I will validate their current approach and most don’t like my answer. First of all let me say that I am by no means an expert on the subject. I only speak out of what my limited experience has shown me. So this is just an explanation of my observations and what has worked for me while training our high school athletes.

These are the steps I use when I try to make someone ‘faster’:

Technique

The first thing I do is watch them run. The truth is that there are a lot of athletes that don’t know how to run properly.

I break down running into
1. the power phase (0-15 yards)
2. speed phase (after 10-15 yards)
3. Importance of Arm Movement.

We’ll do drills that emphasize the proper tecniques on these 3 phases

Stretching.

Most athletes are tight somewhere in their core and legs. Whether it’s a tight lower back, hips, hammies, etc, they are all connected and full range of motion is needed to get proper lift in your front leg so your back leg can push you further. We’ll implement some sort of general stretching and then focus on specific stretches as we identify problem areas.

We’ll use bands, foam rolling, dynamic stretching, static stretching, whatever it takes to loosen you up. Just keep in mind you have to be consistent and make it a part of your training.

Resistance training.

Yes I do like to make athletes lift weights. The goal is not to get bulky, just strong, especially strong for their size. I’m not sure that anyone ever woke up and said, “I’m too bulky to run”, but if you do it right you can lift to get strong without emphasizing hypertrophy. We are not body building here, just trying to become explosive.

Practice

In the end, practice makes perfect. If you want to run fast you have to practice running fast, a lot. We run to be explosive, we run for conditioning, and then we run for explosiveness while we’re tired.

Nutrition

Hey let’s face it, the lighter you are, the less you have carry while you are running. I like pizza as much as the next guy (probably more than the next guy), but if you really want to get fast you should think about losing weight to get into the low to mid teens on the body fat range.

SO… Who’s right?

So back to the original question, should you lift to get faster or just run? I think both sides are right, you need a little bit of both. Genetics do come into play, as some people are just able to run faster. But if you want to maximize your potential, you need to both lift for strength relative to your size AND practice running.

So there you have it, the above is our plan on maximizing running potential. It’s pretty high level, you can easily google for examples of each phase, but it’s the approach that has shaved off tenths, halves, and even full seconds on forty times for our athletes.

The key is to keep at it and stay the course. It can take weeks, usually months (an off season), but the results will come.